How Cameras Can Track Every Car in the U.S., and Iran’s Catch-22

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**Tracy Mumford** (0:33)
From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Monday, August 10th. Here's what we're covering.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:44)
You see the white pole up there? Just below that, kind of in the middle of it, actually.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:49)
There's a camera kind of sticking down flat.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:53)
I see it, yeah. That's one.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:56)
That's one.

**Tracy Mumford** (0:57)
Around the country, up on poles and light posts, more and more surveillance cameras are going up, specifically aimed at tracking people's license plates.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:07)
To the left.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:08)
Okay. The left pole.

**Tracy Mumford** (1:09)
Law enforcement has embraced them.
The technology can help officers see within seconds where a car might be and where it has been. Yeah.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:19)
Yeah.

**Tracy Mumford** (1:19)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:20)
Oh, right there. I see it. Yeah. The solar panel.

**Tracy Mumford** (1:23)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:23)
Okay. And that's a Flock?

**Tracy Mumford** (1:25)
That is one of the biggest companies in the mix is Flock. It has 120,000 cameras alongside roads in every state except Alaska, and it has contracts with 40 percent of all law enforcement departments in the US. But as its cameras have spread, so has the opposition.
Americans may be used to surveillance cameras. Lots of people willingly put cameras in their doorbells even. But what sets Flock apart is that it's created a vast searchable network that police all over the country can access. And for some people, once they start noticing the cameras, they're realizing just how many there are.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:06)
A few weeks ago, I went on a ride along in North Texas, right outside of Dallas with a 27-year-old who had joined the grassroots movement against Flock and license plate readers like it. He was going around documenting the locations of these cameras, and he saw this as his form of protest. He had, like many Americans, accepted a certain level of surveillance in their lives digitally and physically, whether that's cameras at an airport or hanging off the side of a business.
But the ubiquitous nature of these cameras seemingly coming up overnight was really a step too far.

**Tracy Mumford** (2:44)
My colleague Fernando Alfonso recently drove around in Texas where people have been adding the location of cameras they spot to an app called D-Flock, a reaction to the company's spread.
Flock's pitch to police departments has been simple. It can help them solve crimes. For example, a spokeswoman for a police union in Texas said authorities had been able to recover hundreds of stolen vehicles. But there have also been a number of controversies about how license plate readers have been used. Officers have abused their access to Flock data, including using it to track their romantic partners.
Several cities like Los Angeles and Dayton, Ohio recently suspended their contracts with Flock to prevent immigration authorities from accessing camera data. And in Texas, an officer used Flock's cameras to track a woman across state lines who was suspected of getting abortion medication.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:39)
I spoke to a lot of folks across Texas and how they felt about Flock in their communities. And their feelings and their sentiment really reflects a bigger, a national trend where whether you're in New York or California or in between, what I learned is that it didn't matter if you were liberal, it didn't matter if you were conservative. This technology and how prevalent it's become in many of these communities was something people were very, very concerned about.

**Tracy Mumford** (4:11)
In response to questions from The Times, Flock's CEO acknowledged that the conversation around cameras and privacy is, quote, going to be an ongoing debate probably forever. And he added, we should have this debate and we should continue to evolve our point of view as a society of what we're comfortable with and what level of safety we want.
Now, two quick updates on negotiations in the Middle East. First, in Israel yesterday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government is rejecting a plan for Gaza that had been backed by the Trump administration. Last month, President Trump said his Board of Peace had reached a major breakthrough, brokering a deal for Hamas to begin turning over some of its weapons and for Israel to begin withdrawing some of its troops. There was immediate skepticism, however, about how that would work, and now Netanyahu has openly dismissed the plan, saying Israeli forces won't pull back at all until Hamas gives up all its weapons. It's an unusually public break between Netanyahu and Trump, but Netanyahu is facing a tough re-election campaign this fall, the first national vote since the October 7th attacks, and he's under pressure not to make concessions to Hamas. That leaves Gazans in limbo, with many of the 2 million people there still living in sprawling tent camps, since Israel has also insisted there will be no wide-scale rebuilding until Hamas disarms.